You really need to come down from cloud cuckoo land and join the real world. There is one thing that drives a capitalist economy and that is the pursuit of profit. No manufacturer (and that include the likes of Sony and even Apple) pay any more for any component in any product than they have to.

Apple have sold something like 100m iPhones. Suppose they could save just $0.01 per unit that would have been $1m!! If they paid $1 more per unit than they really needed to that would have cost $100,000,000 - that is 1/10th of 1 billion dollars!!

You really need to come down from cloud cuckoo land and join the real world. There is one thing that drives a capitalist economy and that is the pursuit of profit. No manufacturer (and that include the likes of Sony and even Apple) pay any more for any component in any product than they have to.

Of course they don't pay more than they have to, but they don't choose the cheapest components. Certainly Apple could cut down the production cost from that $236 to say $100, but then it would be a much less desirable product that doesn't sell at the same margin. They don't use a cheap display nor a cheap processor. You can't just calculate that they would now make $136 * 100M more profit, since they wouldn't get the same price or sell the same numbers. It's a different thing, if you can save without any difference to the product (that a customer would notice).

An air conditioner or a waching machine is of course a totally different product, but they are getting more "inteligent" and thus may need a better MCU than the absolutely cheapest one. I really can't see xmega as a terrible expensive one that could not be used in them.

When I lived in US one summer I had to buy a air conditioner (about 8 years ago), and they had one for $69 and a quick test Wallmart has one for $112.

You don't know perhaps you get the extra feature by changing a switch on the mother board. (They make you get into the store with the low price but happy leave the store paying $100 for some added features), but other times there actually are some of the features that cost more to produce.

Atmel SAM L is close and has a buck converter but its BACKUP mode with RTC is about one microamp (14uA max at 85C); ATxmega256A3U power-save with RTC is one microamp typical to 3uA max. (85C or 105C).

I'd like to see more XMEGAs with battery backed RTCs. The current selection is quite small, but it's an important feature.

Someone is bound to say that there is the 16 bit RTC peripheral, so allow me to explain why a more independent one is desirable. The problem with the XMEGA 16 bit RTC is that you the MCU resets it normally loses its count. You can kinda get around it by marking the in-memory variables as "no init", but basically a reset is going to screw your RTC up to a lesser to greater extent.

...
Development over many years at the University of Michigan and Ambiq Micro has led to many sub-threshold innovations ...
...
There are ultra-low energy real-time clock designs that can check for external issues, such as issues raised by hardware interrupts or changes in input voltage sensed by a comparator.
...

The fact that this micro isn't available anywhere and that there is no final public datasheet rather suggests that it's pre-production, which means all bets on performance are off.

gchapman wrote:

Ambiq Micro sells the die to Abracon for packaging and test

The datasheet lists the part numbers as AM1805 and AM1815. Farnell UK and Mouser UK don't list them under those part numbers. How am I supposed to know that I need to search for Abracon parts? I found it on the Ambiq web site, I tried searching suppliers for Ambiq and came up with nothing.

Looks like for < $4 you can have one of your own. Similar quantities for the WLCSP package type. Seems they're behind schedule on the 256KB, 128KB, and 64KB versions (meant to be available 4Q15, but parts searches turn up nothing).

Future Electronics also shows up in the search results for that part number from ECIA and Octopart.

Future Electronics also carries the rest of Ambiq's silicon, and a couple of eval kits for the micros:

We did look at those. The 18F has an old, terrible architecture that would make our application unnecessarily complex, doesn't have enough RAM and is rather expensive. The 24F can only do 1ksps on the 16 bit channels, and we need at least 5ksps. Believe me, we looked long and hard before selecting XMEGA.

You do other things on a micro at the same time, if you can sleep it could work, but in general you could have IO's go high and low around the time of sampling, and that could easy make 1mV noise internal in the chip. (just a simple thing like receiving on the UART could come at anytime)

Just to clarify, I'm not looking for alternatives. There are other options, but we selected XMEGA because it's got the right features (not just ADC) and at the right price. The IDE is excellent, light years ahead of most of the competition (MPLAB X is crap, our PIC guy has an elaborate system to compile the code in Visual Studio 2008 because the code browsing is so much better) and the architecture is one of the best I've ever seen for 8 bit. We are now making thousands of these things every month and are very happy with the MCU, and have used other XMEGA parts in other products.

Something very bad is happening at Microchip. Prices on a lot of stuff doubled since the take-over, and it seems like they going to ditch a lot of product lines. Their main interest in Atmel seems to have been ARM/wireless stuff, and the new ASF 4 only has very basic support for XMEGA.

As of January 15, 2018, Site fix-up work has begun! Now do your part and report any bugs or deficiencies here.

No guarantees, but if we don't report problems they won't get much of a chance to be fixed! Details/discussions at link given just above.

"Some questions have no answers."[C Baird] "There comes a point where the spoon-feeding has to stop and the independent thinking has to start." [C Lawson] "There are always ways to disagree, without being disagreeable."[E Weddington] "Words represent concepts. Use the wrong words, communicate the wrong concept." [J Morin] "Persistence only goes so far if you set yourself up for failure." [Kartman]

That blog post was from a year ago, and all that has appeared are the new xTiny parts... Which are very nice, can't wait to use them, but I still love XMEGA.

I'm going to have to make a real effort to get going with SAM. I just hate having to use libraries for everything, they are never as flexible or debuggable as just hitting the registers directly. I don't know why ARM has to be such a pain in the arse in that respect... Other 32 bit parts aren't that bad.

"And he says interest in the 8bit MCU remains strong. “Volume and revenue from the 8bit MCU sector continue to increase,” he said, “and we’re talking about billions. If you, as a manufacturer, can show you’re continuing to invest in a sector, then you will get a return on that investment – and Microchip is investing more today in the AVR portfolio than Atmel did over the last three years,” he concluded."

I was reading somewhere and can't find it right now, that 32bit was on the increase in sales but seems to now be slowing compared to 8bit.

I was reading somewhere and can't find it right now, that 32bit was on the increase in sales but seems to now be slowing compared to 8bit.

I would imagine that's because "32-bit" (specifically, ARM) is probably reaching (or has already reached?) saturation by now?

And there's probably some who were simply following the fad but have now realised that there are still places where 8-bit fits better - so there's a bit of adjustment going on there. We saw that from NXP recently ...

I was reading somewhere and can't find it right now, that 32bit was on the increase in sales but seems to now be slowing compared to 8bit.

At the low end 8 bit parts are cheap enough now that you can just throw them into a design where previously you would have had some glue logic or a special purpose IC. I think there are more people who can do both electronic design and 8 bit code as well now. Being able to buy pre-programmed parts cheaply helps as well.

The proliferation of battery powered devices is also creating demand for 8 bit. IoT and wearables.

Right, you may not really need an ARM in a toaster oven unless it's an IOT or has a video camera and sound.

ARM is quite competitive on price now, but the other big issue is reliability. For a toaster, that could potentially start a fire, you want something robust. Code as simple as possible, fully tested and audited. No huge black box libraries of manufacturer code. Run at 32kHz, single supply, wide temperature range, simple 8 bit ADC etc. It's realistic to do a full system test on power-up too, e.g. check all your RAM works properly, CRC the firmware and so on.